Cynthia Estlund

Cynthia Estlund (born 1957) is the Catherine A. Rein Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.

Estlund teaches labor law, employment law, and property law and has published numerous articles on the subject of labor and employment.

Estlund graduated from Lawrence University with a B.A. in government, summa cum laude, in 1978.

She then studied government programs for working parents in Sweden as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow.

She earned her J.D. at Yale Law School in 1983 and was a Notes Editor for the Yale Law Journal.

After a judicial clerkship with Judge Patricia M. Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Estlund reported on the prosecution of human rights abuses in Argentina as a J. Roderick MacArthur Fellow.

She practiced law for several years, primarily with the labor law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser.

Estlund joined the University of Texas School of Law faculty in 1989 and was Regents Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

She subsequently joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 1999, where she was the Isidore and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and additionally the Vice Dean for Research until her move to NYU in 2006.

Her husband Samuel Issacharoff is also a professor at New York University School of Law.

In her book Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (Oxford University Press 2003), she argued that the workplace is a site of both comparatively successful integration and intense cooperation and sociability, and explored the implications for democratic theory and for labor and employment law.

She has over twenty publications in peer-reviewed journals, including the leading law reviews.